Peter Hirshberg writes a great piece on Young People, Overwhelmed by Friends, Turns to Friendinis.
snip:
“We’ve had lo-cal cola, lo-cal chips, and now comes lo-cal friendships,” says Terence Loughton of Cambridge University.
are we ready for friends-lite? because of technology we are adding more “friends” then ever before. but is this just a rehashing of the old debate on friends vs acquaintances?
Auren
This is silly. I suppose bigpharma will market a pill for Friendinitis. Self help gurus, talk shows, informercials to follow. There was a brief article in the New York Times over the New Year describing how one person fretted about how to end a friendship due to lack of time,interest, and general moving on in one’s life.
Life is more than the raw numbers of contacts in Outlook. Social networks, portable data and communications devices, free trade, freerer speech, and search technology enable more people to instigate and maintain all levels of relationships.
I don’t think there is some threshold. Of course studies may say that tests on monkeys indicate that the human mind can manage 150 relationships well. I think the important point is that if one is fortunate to have acess to all these tools to have all these many friends then one should make best use of the triggers that one uniquely sees in the ever growing pool of data. Or, dare I say it, the Matrix…
Having friends may be the possesive way and wrong way to look at this. Friends are not objects for possession. Sure their digital spirits are saved in blogs, hard discs, and in leaks traded on the web (e.g., dating sites).
Perhaps the proper question here is whether people are underwhelmed (rather than overwhelemed) by friends because they fail to see something in the reltionship that triggers a moment, an idea, and action that is shared or conveyed?
Peter